Paul Rosenberg makes some important points. From Rosenberg at freemansperspective.com:
An unusual set of family events found me sitting in a Starbucks last Saturday night. It had been a reasonably decent day, but there are, as we all know, plenty of things in this world to be depressed about. And those things, as we also know, are massively amplified by the attention-seeking class. (Bad news sells.) Somehow, the parade of negativity had its effect on me.
Sitting in the Starbucks cured me.
What I Saw
It was a very average Starbucks in a very average location. And the very average people sitting with me were a near-perfect cross-section of the American demographic.
To my left was a middle-aged black man, doing something on his laptop. Just past him was a middle-aged white woman doing the same. Past her, in the corner, were three teenage girls – one black, one white, one Latin – studying something together.
Behind me was another black man with a laptop and piles of papers, and past him was a young couple falling in love over lattes.
At the big center table was a 25ish woman, with multiple piles of paper upon which she was working very hard. After a while, her boyfriend showed up. She hugged him, laid her head on his shoulder, and they kissed. It was sweet. Then he got to work with her.
There were also people coming and going. They were more of the same: A cross-sectional American parade of people behaving quietly and well.
This is the larger part of human life – the life that you don’t see on the news. And they reminded me that all is not dark, no matter how much darkness we see on television and streaming across the Internet.
This is the part of human life that we should be giving our attention to. Watching them, I decided that it would be far better to spend time helping these people than to obsess on all the bad things in the world. These people deserve our efforts.
What Would Help the Bright Side of Humanity?
That, of course, brought me to the question of how to help the bright side of humanity, and I decided that a great start would be to make one point very clearly:
Fear is a brain hack, a malicious and effective brain hack.
When people want to get their hands on your time and money – and don’t want to be bothered with that pesky ‘reason’ thing – fear is how they do it… over and over and over. Fear works.
To continue reading: A Saturday Night at Starbucks
